Sand whispered across the stone markers. A thousand wind-swept names worn to nothing.
Elias knelt before the nearest grave.
The name was his.
Not metaphorical. Not symbolic.His full name, Elias Vern Dāel, etched in pale cipher across the glassine stone.
"This is the 17th," Rae whispered beside him, her voice tinged with reverb, glitching ever so slightly. "Seventeen attempts. Seventeen failures. This was the last one before the Watcher intervened."
They were in a valley of graves.Not made by others.Made by versions of himself.
Some headstones had dates. Some had cipher spirals that burned the eye to look at.One had a mirror embedded in its center, cracked clean through, as if something inside had tried to leave.
Elias stood, heart heavy.
He wasn't the chosen one.
He was the latest.
And possibly the last.
The valley was known as Hallowcairn in rebel legend.They called it the place where memory goes to die.
No one ventured here anymore.But Rae had brought him, not the version in his ear, but a projection burned into the path ahead.
She flickered in and out like a damaged recording.
"I buried them all," she said once, expression unreadable."Each time they failed to breach the recursion, I kept the thread. Hoping."
Elias crouched beside one marker. It bore no name. Just a sentence:
"He chose silence. It did not choose him back."
His breath caught. He could feel the echo of that life. The one where he never spoke again after failing to save Rae.
Another grave, shallower than the others, had been dug up. Sand blew into it, unsettled. There were footsteps leading out.
"One of them escaped," Elias said.
Rae didn't answer.
He turned to face her, but she was gone again, leaving only static in the air.
At the center of Hallowcairn, beneath the largest obelisk, was a sigil Elias had never seen before. Not a Cipher mark. Not a Mirror glyph. Something older.
When he touched it, the world shimmered.
And then he wasn't there anymore.
He stood inside a hallway of rust and memory.
Walls made of recording crystal. Fragments of other lives reflected in every pane.
A younger Elias standing before the Order of Glass, shouting truths they could not understand.
Another, working beside Rae in a bunker full of fractured relics, her face still human.
One Elias screaming in a burning city, clutching a dead Watcher in his arms.
And one, the one who survived Hallowcairn, walking across dunes alone, mirror shard embedded in his spine.
The scene rippled. A whisper behind him:
"You are not the first to want to fix the loop."
He turned.
A figure stood in the dark.
Half-face glass. One eye spiraled into recursion.Cloak marked with rebel ink and Order threads.
It spoke like Elias, but deeper.
"You are the first to ask what must be lost to make it right."
Elias staggered.
"Who are you?"
The figure smiled.
"I was the one who kept walking.""Even after Rae was gone. Even after the Watcher fell. Even after memory collapsed."
It raised a hand.
"You call me survivor. But that is not the truth."
"The truth is, we all break."
"I simply chose to break in the shape of something useful."
The vision shattered.
Elias dropped to the sand, gasping.
The graves were gone.
The desert stretched wide again, endless and burning.
But something was now buried inside him, the knowledge that someone else had made it further. That survival came not from leaping faster…
…but from accepting what must stay broken.
As he stood, the wind shifted and he saw new footsteps in the sand.
Leading onward.
Not Rae's.
Not his own.
Darwish.
And they were fresh.